Foreigners derailed by train ticket policy

A recent tale of a foreigner attempting to purchase a train ticket at Beijing South Railway Station revealed what must be one of the most wonderfully pointless electronic options in the world.

The woman later complained on the social network "Foursquare" that the machine included an English option, only to find out that she couldn't buy a ticket from it because she wasn't a Chinese national.

Logically, one must assume that this option is aimed at Chinese nationals who cannot read Chinese but can read English. If this is the target demographic, then I can only ask, who is this person, and where do they live? Perhaps this is an attempt to encourage Chinese nationals to practice their English skills using practical methods of learning.

Or maybe this is an interesting example of the paradoxical desire for the capital to be international and yet simultaneously homogenous. Perhaps it was never even a topic of discussion when the matter of identification input was decided and the seemingly obvious choice of recognizing only Chinese identification became the end result. The inclusion of an English option may have been a desire to make the device appear sophisticated and trendy.

Or maybe the programmers were concerned about the possibility of the machine losing face in front of a foreigner, and were merely trying to save the machine from this terrible embarrassment by providing it with protection. By having an option that included English, the machine would be able to be polite and helpful to the non-national, right up to the moment when the unpleasantness over the nationality issue brought the proceedings to a close.

The issue of train tickets has been an almost morbidly fascinating one for me during my time in Beijing. In my first year in Beijing, I went on a trip to Hong Kong at Spring Festival. My employer used a not inconsiderable level of guanxi to make sure I had a ticket going to and coming back from Hong Kong. This was a feat that caused quite a fuss amongst the Chinese employees, who tried to convey the import of such a profound gesture, as everyone else would have to line up for a ticket in Hong Kong. I ultimately came across as being somewhat ungrateful. The idea that I would not be ecstatic about having a return ticket for a train was conceptually alien to my co-workers.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this is that it seems to be in the domain of the train. This doesn't seem to be an issue in the aviation industry when it comes to domestic travel, where issues of nationality or ticket types do not appear to be such a cause for concern. And yet, what is a plane, if not a glorified train that travels through the sky instead of on rails? Although it would mean I would have fewer interesting anecdotes to tell when visiting home, bringing the train system closer in line with the plane system might result in fewer complaints.